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First Two Volumes Making Europe Presented Sepember 19

16 September 2013

On September 19 2013 the first two volumes of the book series Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850-2000 will be presented to Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. The other four volumes will be published in 2014. Making Europe shows how Europe was built on technology. Engineers, companies and citizens started building a united Europe more than 150 years ago by circulating goods, people, energy, ideas, and information between countries. Making Europe reveals the history of a united Europe that wasn’t shaped by political treaties as much as through day-to-day practices of companies, consumers, and organizations via transnational networks and infrastructures.

First two volumes presented on September 19 2013

Making Europe will result in a six volume book series that will be published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2013 and 2014. The book series is accompanied by the European Digital Museum for Science and Technology Inventing Europe. The first two volumes of the book series will be presented September 19. The presentation takes place at the conference Democracy & Technology. Europe in Tension from the 19th to 21th century at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Volume 1, Consumers, Tinkerers, Rebels: The People Who Shaped Europe, is written by Ruth Oldenziel (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and Mikael Hård (Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany). Who wielded the power to shape innovations, from the railway to the computer? The authors claim it was consumers and users. They reveal the untold story of user movements; ordinary people who appropriated technologies and used those technologies to forge Europe in their own image.

Martin Kohlrausch (KU Leuven, Belgium) and Helmuth Trischler (Deutsches Museum, Germany) wrote the second volume Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers. Focusing on experts in technology and science this volume delivers a new reading of European history. We see experts shaping societies, setting political agendas, and creating cross-border collaborations. The authors show that experts’ unique knowledge was key to uniting - as well as fragmenting - the European continent.

European initiative

Making Europe is a European initiative. The initial research was made possible by the European Science Foundation and various national research councils. A consortium of prominent European researchers and research institutes is carrying out the program lead by the Foundation for the History of Technology. A growing group of companies supports the program financially. Among others these are Philips, FrieslandCampina, DSM, EBN, SIDN, TNO, SNS Reaal Fund, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, and Next Generation Infrastructures.